As the field of healthcare continues to become more specialized, the provision of services by many healthcare workers and/or providers to one patient and/or many patients may increase. In order to accomplish this, healthcare delivery has been organized into specialized departments or healthcare sources such as, for example, nursing, laboratory, pharmacy, and radiology departments. Each department has the responsibility for accomplishing its particular, often specialized, subset of tasks. Sometimes the departments are associated with different healthcare enterprises or offices having different geographic locations. Unfortunately, this has resulted in sub-optimal healthcare operations because patient information related to a single patient that is stored at various departments may not be easily accessible from a single place.
This patient information, or medical data, may be stored in a database environment configured to store large volumes of data. Furthermore, the medical data stored in the database environment may be processed by, for example, searching the stored medical data. Details with respect to conventional methods for storing and/or accessing medical data in and/or from databases is discussed in, for example, United States Patent Publication Nos. US 2003/0088438 and US 2003/0177132.
The patient information, for example, medical procedure information, may be stored using one of many standards, such as clinical procedure treatment (CPT) standard, healthcare common procedure coding system (HCPCS), and the like. Thus, synthesizing this patient information into coherent pictures may be difficult because the same information may be called something different in each database. Furthermore, as the amount of available medical data expands, it may become increasingly difficult to synthesize the medical data, especially for research and comparison purposes. For example, use of the medical data for purposes of diagnosing/treating various medical conditions and/or researching medical areas may be very difficult.